Modern LED lighting fixtures that utilize DMX (Digital Multiplexing) for their control are often difficult to control without large, complicated, and expensive lighting controllers.
For example DMX for lighting is typically implemented using a “DMX 512” standard, which includes 512 DMX slots to control various aspects of a lighting installation. However, each of those 512 available slots may control different aspects of a lighting installation in difference cases. Further, in cases where only a subset of the available 512 slots are in use, it is not always obvious which of those 512 slots are in use. Accordingly, the control of these LED fixtures requires many slots of DMX control which are often not intuitive and often require the user to look up the manual just to be able to turn on and test the fixture.
Some portable devices exist that can control individual DMX slots of a lighting installation. However, existing devices typically transmit signals blindly to specific DMX slots, and therefore a user will need to look up which slot to use in order to properly use or test various features of the lighting installation. Further, devices exist that utilize smart phone applications for control purposes. However, such devices typically require a connection from the phone's audio jack which requires a wired connection to the device and prevents the phone from being used to make or receive phone calls while in use.
Existing tools for controlling lighting suffer from drawbacks such as being too large to carry with the user, not containing an internal database of fixture parameters, being unable to automatically load the fixture parameters via RDM, (thereby requiring the user to hunt or guess for the DMX slots that control, color, intensity, or other attributes). Further, existing tools require a wired connection between the lighting fixture and the controller thereby requiring the user to be in close proximity with the fixture. In such devices, wired controls are required since standard wireless protocols, such as RDM, require that data be transmitted at a higher rate than smartphone wireless protocols can manage.
Further, while existing systems may utilize smart phone applications, and may allow you to add text to slots to identify the parameter of the attribute once known, using that feature requires the fixture attributes to first be known. Further, once a label is set, a user typically cannot easily move the group of labels to a new DMX start address. Accordingly, a particular setup, such as for a show, may have dozens of distinct fixture types, and setting them all up could take several hours.
Further, some existing systems only allow 12 slots of control at a time, and some fixtures may require dozens of slots of control, thus it is impossible to control the fixture adequately. Further, some slots of control have various levels that perform various distinct functions, and without direct setting of the level it is not possible to perform the various functions. For example, a slot data value of 128 may set the fixture color for a specified fixture to magenta and a slot data value of 129 may instead set the fixture color to blue. Without direct control of the slot data value, it is difficult to control this function.
There is no portable tool that lighting users can carry with them that allows them to select and control LED lighting fixtures with DMX and RDM (Remote Device Management) with a wireless connection from the tool to the app, and which selects the fixture's personality manually or detects it automatically using RDM.